


The Sum of his Parts

by noxiousSanctity



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alfor is here hi space dad, Amputee! Shiro, But Dark, But still being a huge nerd, Characters as not expected characters, Cinderella AU, Coran is also here henlo space uncle, F/M, Hunk being Hunk and seeing past the physical, Hunk ignoring stereotypes, M/M, Prince! Hunk, Shiro and Hunk Character building, ableist slurs, abusive household, magic animals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 13:09:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11358174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noxiousSanctity/pseuds/noxiousSanctity
Summary: Shiro lost his father at a young age and is taken in by a family with very little concern for his welfare. Several years later, a ball is being hosted at the castle, where a Prince is looking for brain rather than looks. Shiro sees it as his chance to escape, and Hunk sees it as a chance to grow.





	The Sum of his Parts

**Author's Note:**

> First off, I want to apologize heavily to all of my readers. I haven't been active on here all that much, and that is because I've been going through some rough patches, trying to adapt to being home, trying to relearn everything and then the things that have changed due to my deployment, and all of the Zines I have been doing. I am currently involved in the Keith Zine, the Hunk Zine, and the Shiro x Rest Zine. All of these are wonderful and full of wonderful writers and artists and I would honestly love if you would be willing to check them out! All you gotta do is look them up like that, and they should pop up. Two of them are Charity Zines, and one is paid. Please help support these artists and writers, and I promise that I'll be hunkering down as fast as I can to bring you guys all of the stuff I've been promising for a while! For now, though, please enjoy the Shunk and Shiro Character development I'll hopefully be bringing into this story. Also, if there's anything I need to know about prosthetics or something you wish for me to know, please come find me at my twitter or Tumblr @noxiousSanctity! Thank you and I hope you enjoy this!

            Shiro doesn’t remember much of his father.

            In fact, Shiro remembers very little at all about his childhood before the age of seven. He remembers kind words, a warm smile, and a large hand ruffling his hair. He remembers being happy, being full of life and unafraid of what the world could throw at him.

            Until the world threw at him a carriage, killing his father and destroying his right arm.

            From then, the world gets put in much sharper contrasts. He remembers being taken to a hospital, the looks of horror as they saw his arm was absolutely destroyed up to the bicep. He remembers being sewn up time and time again as they desperately tried to save his life and finally succeeding but at the cost of a giant scar across his face, a new patch of white hair and a lost sense of self-worth. He was seven, not stupid. He knew how they whispered about him, calling him a crippled boy. Calling him useless now, looking at him with either pity or mock sadness. And since he had no mother, there never really was anyone else for him to run to, to cry to and be comforted by. He was all alone, patched up but not put together again. The children that he knew called him ‘Humpty Dumpty’ because they thought he really _did_ look like a cracked egg on the sidewalk and someone had tried to glue him back into his former self. Though apparently, All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t find his arm. Ha. Funny.

            Since there was nowhere else for him to go, he stayed in a place for kids like him. The hospital had a name, but all Shiro could remember was a girl with no legs telling him that _‘This is a hospital for broken things; things like you and me.’_ And at first, he tried to deny it. He tried to tell everyone there that _no,_ he was not part of the broken things. But denial turned to resignation, and resignation turned to anger. Pure, simmering anger that itched at his skin, a child with no arm and no way of escaping his own version of hell. For the horrible few weeks that he had to stay there, looking at the children who had given up, he could feel the rage just prickle at his skin. And it wasn’t just physical breaks that they held here: They held children who broke their _minds_. Children who’s minds had simply, one day, snapped. Some of them wore personal jackets, the ones the doctors called ‘huggers’. Some of them were kept in their rooms, and some of them… well, some of them were taken away and never came back. But they knew where they went.

            They had nowhere else to go, anyway.

            Just days from the three month anniversary of the accident, someone came into the hospital, looking for him. It wasn’t anyone he recognized, but when the staff at the hospital told him that he was going to leave with these people, he didn’t give a damn about who they could be. They could be _murderers_ , and he couldn’t care. He couldn’t give a _single_ shit about who they could be, because he was _leaving._ He was finally getting out of that hellhole, just at the girl with no legs was being wheeled away to the place where nobody returned from, a crazy look of madness on her face.

            Good. Let her rot.

            The person that met him was not someone he recognized. A dark-skinned woman with icy white hair and beady yellow eyes watched him with a strange sense of curiousity. Her face seemed squished, as if someone had molded her face to be in a permanent look of disgust. And when she introduced herself as Shiro’s aunt, her voice was like sandpaper, dry and rough. And she certainly _tried_ to look like a warm figure, with her purple floor length dress and yellow shawl that wrapped around her like a cloak. Nothing, however, could hide or change the way that malice oozed out of every pore in her body, how sharp her teeth looked as she smiled or how predatorial her gaze was. But she was his only ticket out of this personal hellhole, so he smiled, he hugged the little more than skins and bone woman, and soon enough he was being taken away, the iron gates of the Isle for broken things shutting with a resounding clang. Even when he was pushed into a carriage roughly, he didn’t let his shaking become too obvious. He had a feeling that being vulnerable with his new ‘family’ would not be something that would ever happen, and he was right.

            The house that they turned into, the horse’s steps crushing against the stone of the walkway, wasn’t a house. It was more like a _castle_. He couldn’t stop his quiet gasp of wonder at the strange three storied building, spread wide just like the hospital but not nearly as dark. The walls of the house were a light green, covered in ivy, and the roof was made of the same thing the night was, dark but pretty nonetheless. He could hear the woman behind him sigh in exasperation from his antics, but he couldn’t care. Not when he lifted his left hand up and touched the glass carefully, letting out a breath of relief. He was out. He was here. He was safe.

            He stepped out of the carriage, unable to hide his flinch when the horse snorted and stomped its foot. Neither could he stop the way he gripped the side of his pants as tight as he could while his new… mother? Step Mother? Pushed him out of the way, making him stumble as she beelined directly for the house. The door flung open without her even touching them, two boys yelling and shoving each other out of the way in order to get to their mother, who smiled and kneeled down to take them into her arms and kiss both of their foreheads. She could be heard cooing to them soft and wonderful things, like presents. Presents? There were no packages in the carriage. What present did she possibly get?

            “Come on, Lotor; Haxus. Come here and get your present!” The two boys giggled wildly and then that was the first time that Shiro got a real good look at who they were. Lotor, the younger it seemed, had the icy white hair of his mother and the eyes. However, his face was not squished or pudgy, but rather angular and elegant. Though that couldn’t stop his ugly snorting or haughty sneer as they approached Shiro, and already the stranger was sizing him up. Haxus, the second, was a pudgy lump of a boy, his face squishy and his eyes a dark yellow, like how he imagined stomach acid to be. There were a few of his teeth missing and his hair was curly, full of uneven locks. Shiro couldn’t help but eye them warily, especially as their mother stepped forward again, hunched over the two of them. “Now boys, this is Shiro. And he’s your new present!”

            Shiro’s body suddenly went cold.

            Lotor seemed to be the leader of the two, as he immediately made a noise of disgust and looked back at his mother with a displeased expression. “But mother, he’s already broken! He’s missing his arm! We don’t want a broken toy!”

            Shiro couldn’t help but clench his fist as the mother leaned down to kiss Lotor’s forehead. “No, not at all, sweetheart! In fact, I brought him because even after all of that, he’s _not_ broken. Look in his eyes.” A finger pointed almost accusingly back at Shiro, and his little jaw clenched. “Even after losing that, after becoming a cripple, he’s _still_ not broken! What do you think, sweetheart? Do you think that you’re up to the task?”

            “I’m not a cripple.” Shiro’s voice was tiny, but strong for a little boy. He wiggled his fingers to try and relax them. “I’m not. I can do anything you guys can do. I’m not a present, I’m a person.”

            “Oh! He’s smart!” Haxus squealed in delight, clapping his hands together. “He even talks back! This one is much better than the other one. I can’t even remember his name now, ha!”

            These people were sick, Shiro decided. Sicker than the rest of the people that were actually in the asylum. Especially as Lotor stepped towards him, puffing out his chest and tilting his head, the smug look of his mother already down as a grin stretched the right side of his face. “You can do anything we can, huh?” Shiro couldn’t stop his stubborn nod, the way that he subtly puffed his chest up as well, to prove that he wasn’t going to be a pushover, when Lotor snatched his left hand and raised it far above his head, ignoring Shiro’s shout of surprise. “Well then, this should be easy.” Lotor’s delight was audible. “Punch me.”

            Shiro’s eyes widened and he looked at the tiny space between them. It wasn’t far. It wasn’t… He tried his hardest to yank his hand out of Lotor’s grip, but then two hands wrapped around his wrist and tightened their grip. He yanked as best as he could against the hold, but when nothing happened, he tried to raise his other- his… his stub… and shove him away. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even make it halfway to Lotor’s chest. He swallowed audibly, unable to stop the way his jaw trembled and his face grew hot and his eyes stung. He wouldn’t cry. He _wouldn’t._

            “Heh.” Lotor’s voice broke his haze, and he looked up to stare at triumphant yellow eyes. “It seems you _can’t_ do anything we can. Pity.”

            Hot rage built up in Shiro’s chest, and he couldn’t stop the quick movement of jumping and kicking Lotor hard in the chest with both feet, sending the other boy straight into the ground along with Shiro. Lotor scrambled to get up, but Shiro was faster, rolling to his side and sitting on his stomach, ignoring Lotor’s screeching and punching him hard in the face with his left hand. He only got a few hits in, screaming as loud as he could while doing it, because immediately he was yanked off of the older boy and slapped by their mother. His new mother. She was yelling something at him, but he couldn’t hear her, the white hot anger rushing through his ears too violent to even try. But there was something more there: The rush of Victory.

            He didn’t need his arm to win. He had made his point.

* * *

 

             SO in the end, they had actually brought him home to be a plaything. But when that didn’t work (He had apparently given Lotor a black eye) they shoved him into the kitchens, making his bed out of hay and tattered old blankets. Shiro was too exhausted to care, and even if he did he wouldn’t say anything. He had been given mundane chores to do, cleaning and doing dishes and feeding their animals (he still couldn’t manage to get too close to the horse, though the horse didn’t seem to care) and by the time he was free to go to bed, he was so tired that he almost flopped down on the hay, missing the sounds of… meowing. He blinked, looking over to his little bed and seeing two tiny little kittens, one with red fur and violet eyes, and another with… strangely blue fur and bright blue intelligent eyes. Both of them were shivering violently and mewing loudly at Shiro, as if demanding his attention.

            “Get lost.” He murmured, sliding down the cobble of the wall behind him. The cats seemingly didn’t understand or just didn’t care, instead choosing to crawl towards him with tiny claws out. They pricked his skin, making him hiss as they climbed up his shins and made their way up to his lap. They seemed to curl into each other, their tiny little purrs sounding so out of place in such a dark room, the only other sound was of the crickets in the back. Tired silver eyes rested on the two creatures once again. “This isn’t the best place to be for you two little guys, yeah? There’s nobody nice here.” The red cat’s head perked up as he spoke, ears directed towards him. It gave him the courage to speak if only a little more. “There’s nobody nice in this world. Nobody. The only person that _was_ nice is gone now. It’s just me. I’m all…” Shiro swallowed weakly as his eyes began to burn again. “… I’m all alone.”

            The truth had never been so evident before, Never so in his face like it was now. Here, alone in a room where he had no allies, nobody to depend on, nobody to cry to and laugh with, nobody. His father was gone. He never even knew his mother. Everyone was out to get him. There was nothing he could do, nobody he could count on.

            He was alone.

            He didn’t even realize he was crying until one of the tears dropped on the blue cat, who mewed softly in indignation. He jerked as if he were shocked and quickly reached down to wipe off the liquid as best he could. “O-oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to- to cry on you! Silly me.” He tried to laugh it off, but when the blue cat began to nudge into his hand with a soft purr, he couldn’t stop the rest of them if he tried with every fibre of his being. His sobs and choked gasps were quiet, but seemed to shake his entire body as he watched the blue one get knocked out of the way by the red one so he could get some pets as well. Neither of them seemed to care there was only one hand to pet them, they just wanted to be pet. They didn’t care that he was missing some pieces. They liked him how he was.

            Blue started crawling up the little boy’s shirt and nuzzled into his neck, making the sobs turn into giggles, even with his face wet and streaked with tears. And when Red (when had he named them?) started nibbling at his fingers for attention, he continued to rub and pet behind their ears just to hear their tiny little purrs and see their eyes close as they curled into his body heat. “You guys are nice.” He managed to choke out. “Nice Kitties. I wish you would stay with me. I gotta go to sleep now, but if you let me get to my bed, I’ll make room for you two? Will that be okay?”

            The cats joined him in rest that night, and the night after, and the night after. And for the first time since his accident, Shiro could find a reason to smile in the mornings.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments help me write faster, please do!  
> Twitter: @noxiousSanctity  
> Tumblr: @noxiousSanctity


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